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Cotton and trade background information
About cotton
Trade links with India
Cotton and independence
Changes in trade
Links to the UK
About cotton
Cotton is the most important of all natural fibres, accounting
for almost half of all textiles in the world. It is an excellent
clothing material with a huge variety of uses. Because it is so
strong it can be made into fine, thin textiles, as well as hard-wearing
fabrics like denim.
Cotton is now the world's most important non-food crop, covering
five per cent of the planet's cultivated land area. It is grown
in more than 80 countries around the world. For a good crop a long,
sunny growing season, with at least 180 frost-free days and plenty
of water, is needed. These conditions are found in a band that stretches
around the world between latitudes 45° north and 30° south.
Cotton has been grown and used by people in many parts of the world
for at least 5000 years. Pieces of woven and dyed cloth dating back
as far as 3000 BC have been found near the Indus river in India.
For ancient Greeks and Romans, the muslins of the Ganges delta area
were an exotic and expensive luxury.
Trade links with India
Britain's first links with India came about through trading cotton
and other goods. In the seventeenth century, the East India Company
began bringing cloth from west India, shawls and silks from Kashmir,
spices from the East Indies and Ceylon, and sugar from Bengal. In
return India bought metals, novelties, and ivory. Visitors to India
were impressed by the sophistication and skill of its craftspeople,
by the range of products, and by the way in which manufacturing
was organised and controlled by the State. Indian cloths were so
popular that they transformed European fashion.
For many years, Europe could not compete with India in terms of
trade and so set about finding ways to reduce dependence on these
luxury imports. The Industrial Revolution provided that impetus.
Britain began to impose trade barriers on imported Indian-manufactured
cloths. Gradually, with crippling taxes, India was forced to export
raw cotton instead. This cotton was then processed in Britain's
newly established mills, which began producing cloth for the Indian
market. Faced with such competition, the Indian textile industry
declined. In 1840 the East India Company boasted that 'encouraged
and assisted by our great manufacturing ingenuity and skill, [we
have] succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country
into a country exporting raw produce'.
Cotton and independence
When the protectionist legislation was abandoned in 1925, India
was again confirmed as a major exporter of cloth. Over the years
the production of cloth and garments came to be linked with India's
struggle for independence. Mahatma Gandhi used the domestic weaving
industry as a way of alerting people to the reality of commercial
domination by foreign rulers. 'Khadi' (cloth hand-woven from locally
grown hand-spun cotton) became a symbol of independence and reinvigorated
the hand-loom industry of India.
Like many other cotton-producing countries in the South, India
has again faced problems in recent years. Many countries depend
on exporting a few raw materials such as cotton or coffee. They
are encouraged to export more cash crops as a way of ending their
poverty. This may seem simple, but when world markets are flooded,
prices fluctuate enormously. And it is small-scale farmers, who
have no other source of income, who lose most when prices fall.
Cotton and textile-producing countries have also suffered in recent
years from trade barriers. The Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) restricted
exports from textile-producing countries. These trade barriers cost
poor countries almost $50 billion per year -- as much as all Western
aid put together. Although this quota system was severely criticised,
it did at least offer stability for textile exporters.
Changes in trade
The MFA is now being phased out, but changes in world trading conditions
have had an adverse effect on the countries of the South. With the
freeing up of trade, India's clothing industry has been opened up
to more competition from abroad. As retailers compete to sell clothes,
they demand ever lower production costs. This forces companies in
places such as India to cut wages, reduce job security, and allow
safety standards to decline.
The textile industry is a massive employer in India and a major
source of earnings. In 1995, textiles made up 34 per cent of India's
total exports, compared to 27 per cent in 1970. Cloth is produced
either in factories by machine or on hand-looms. There are approximately
17 million hand-loom weavers in India who usually work at home or
in small production units, often selling their cloth to middlemen.
In recent years hand-loom weavers in particular have suffered major
setbacks in their work. The international price of cotton yarn has
risen and so cotton growers now prefer to export. Hand-loom weavers
have been unable to compete with factories that can afford to buy
yarn at the higher prices. Thousands have lost their livelihoods
and been reduced to starvation.
Links to the UK
The last link in The Clothes Line is in the shops on the UK high
street. In 1994, people in the UK spent £20.4 billion on clothes
(that's the equivalent of £353 per person). A large proportion of
these clothes were imported from Asia, but many people in the UK
also work in the garment industry. Much of this production is done
by women working from their own homes -- there are more than a million
homeworkers in the UK. They often face similar problems to their
counterparts in India, being forced to work for low wages so that
their products can be sold as cheaply as possible.
Recently a large number of organisations have begun calling for
'clean clothes' which have not been made under exploitative conditions.
They are asking retailers in the UK to introduce a code of conduct
-- or to strengthen existing codes -- to guarantee humane working
conditions for the people who make clothes. Some of their demands
are for reasonable working hours, fair pay, job security, equality
of treatment between different workers, no employment of children,
and no forced labour. Today, at the very end of The Clothes Line,
customers are realising that they have power as consumers and can
ask for clothes that have been made under fair conditions.
Through var../../../w.oxfam.org.uk/fair_trade.html" target="_top">Fair
Trade initiatives, Oxfam has been campaigning for decades for
a better deal for Third World producers. One recent focus of our
../../../w.oxfam.org.uk/campaigns.html"
target="_top">campaigning work was our Clothes Code Campaign -- Oxfam called
on the UK’s major retailers to adopt and monitor codes of conduct
to protect workers' rights around the world.
Oxfam's Catalogue for
Schools also contains related materials on trade.
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